Recreational boats are happily used by people on various bodies of water for a wide variety of activities including, for example, fishing water skiing and wake boarding, as well as racing over the water and more mundane peaceful, leisurely travel. Moreover, many people enjoy doing nothing other than enjoying a day while simply sitting on a boat in the peaceful serenity found on a body of water away from the noise and hustle of life on shore.
With so many such enjoyable activities, in fact, many boat users will spend large amounts of their leisure time out on the water on a boat. As a result, during such leisure time the boat will become the home of the users for long periods of time, albeit with somewhat cramped space and facing the keeping water out of the boat user space. As a result, boat manufacturers have found it to be not only desirable for their customers, but necessary to maintain boat sales, to provide amenities in the boat user space which allows for full enjoyment of boating activities. Such amenities, however, are constrained by space limitations and related cost limitations (e.g., while a boat may be made larger to provide more space for one or more amenities, the increase cost of such a larger boat may take the boat out of the price range of many potential purchasers), and are further constrained by the environmental factors unique to a boat floating in the middle of a body of water.
As a result of space limitations, removable amenities have frequently been provided. For example, tables providing space to conveniently eat food or set other items such as drinks have been mounted to boat decks so as to be removable and stored out of the way to open that deck space when the table is not needed. While such tables have provided the desired convenience to place food or drinks, for example, their removable pedestal bases secured to the boat deck require cutting into the boat deck in order to secure the required pedestal mount in the deck. Beyond the obvious problem of unnecessary deck holes in a water environment, such mounts can present safety issues when the base is not mounted thereto. That is, the irregular surface of the deck resulting from the pedestal mounts in the deck could cause a person on the boat to trip and/or (particularly inasmuch as many boat users are barefoot) hurt their foot if they step on the mount incorrectly.
The present invention is directed toward overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.